The prospect of significant licensing changes moved the university to rapidly modernise its IT infrastructure
Regent’s University London was in a hurry. With Broadcom having agreed a deal to acquire the university’s key infrastructure provider VMware, the IT team wanted to move fast to avoid potentially sharp price rises and the prospect of damaging changes in support following the acquisition. Regent’s also sought a path to the future, investment protection and a modern infrastructure and applications.
In-house command of a new, reliable and affordable infrastructure for virtualisation and hyperconvergence
Regent’s was able to strip out a complex VMware installation and replace it within months, without relinquishing technical control of that infrastructure to a partner.
A trusted working relationship with Nutanix and its ecosystem
The university now enjoys a collaborative relationship with its core supplier and can explore an ecosystem of partners and tools.
Peace of mind for leaders and support for students and staff
The university is in safe hands now that Regent’s has a modern and secure environment with clear plans looking forward.
I’d encourage other universities not to assume there is a silver bullet out there and a VMware or Broadcom will come along and address all your issues. The business model for VMware has changed considerably and the Nutanix model is a flexible architecture that fits many sizes of university.
Regent’s University London is a UK higher education institution with a stunning location in 11 acres of one of the Royal Parks near the centre of the capital. It can also point to a cosmopolitan environment with more than 140 nationalities represented on campus and the claim that it delivers a higher percentage of founders among alumni than any other UK peer per capita.
However, it had an issue. When Broadcom announced plans to acquire VMware in mid-2022, news quickly started to filter out about Broadcom’s post-acquisition plans… and some alarming potential consequences for customers and partners. Regent’s immediately saw the need to protect itself from any fallout.
Regent’s had a VMware environment based on about 200 servers, but the news of Broadcom’s pending acquisition raised red flags. The prospective new owner of VMware had thrown into doubt the depth of its commitment to smaller customers, clouded the future of certain products and raised the prospect of higher pricing.
IT director Asad Rehman recalls:
“We had been with VMware for a number of years and we had quite a complex VMware setup for a relatively small university. We were planning to review and simplify the setup as some internal expertise had gone. What prompted us to explore faster was the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and some of the stories we were hearing didn’t sound particularly pleasant.”
“The UCISA support group for UK IT professionals in education that we are part of was having conversations and forums. We were all in similar positions with contracts coming to an end in 12, 18 months, so people were starting to talk about wanting to look elsewhere.”
“We had started looking at Dell and Microsoft Hyper-V, and at and an open source solution. What we wanted to avoid was to get into long discussions with VMware because we weren't getting pricing through or information as to whether they would be working with partners. It all felt like very hard sales tactics. We take security very seriously and we felt these aren't companies we want to be working with for an extended period. And we couldn't go to our partners and say ‘what’s going on?’ because they had the same situation…”
With a modest team of about 20 IT staff, Rehman saw the importance of working as a community. At a UCISA conference, Regent’s and Nutanix discussed ways to relax the Regent’s dependence on VMware. This was in mid-March and Regent’s wanted to be off VMware by the end of July. A tight deadline, but Nutanix was able to move quickly by replicating exercises with similar customers. Also, Regent’s liked Nutanix’s hybrid cloud strategy centred on openness and flexibility.
Things developed quickly. A first sales meeting was followed by a reference call and technical plan for moving an initial two clusters from VMware’s ESXi hypervisor to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. In all, Regent’s moved wholesale to a technology with which they had never engaged in just two months.
Rehman was adamant that Regent’s should have strong controls in place, as it didn’t want the migration to be wholly in the hands of partners. So, after a two-day installation exercise, the university’s IT staff embarked on the migration exercise themselves with the support of Nutanix experts. The initial workloads were completed in a few weeks and then over the next couple of months the rest of the more complex workloads were also migrated.
“I was really impressed by Nutanix managers in pre-sales,” recalls Rehman. “They knew their product really well so our technical guys could get some good pointed questions answered. That was refreshing. We didn’t have the opportunity to say ‘let’s have another meeting in three weeks’. Also, I struggle with hard sales pitches; they put me off. But the Nutanix approach meant we had honest conversations about what we needed to do.”
Regent’s had some challenges in its setup. It had VMware split clusters in two places in the same building and was using communications rooms with AC units rather than fully-fledged datacentres, for example. But Nutanix offered options.
Rehman says:
“Nutanix was able to put together various options for on-prem/on-prem, on-prem/off-prem and using Azure or another cloud provider. It was all really clear and the pricing was good. We also liked the freedom of hardware options and selected Supermicro hardware as that was cheaper and had better support.”
“Deployment went well,” Rehman says. “We completed various questionnaires and forms for them to understand what we were trying to do. Our team started reading up the Nutanix documentation, which was really helpful, so they onboarded to the Nutanix world quickly. We took the bull by the horns. We wanted a strong understanding of what would be set up and why in that way… Nutanix provided that.
“We’ve completely moved away from VMware. It was effectively a clean break. We focused on our on-prem environment so we could accommodate some failover and then took on the NC2 side later in the summer once we had migrated everything over and were happy. We had a small gap to give our team a little break so we could then focus on our third-party DR plan.\
“Nutanix’s licensing is also making us some business savings. We wanted stability within our environment and reliability both for on-prem and DR in the cloud.”
Looking to the future, Regent’s former head of infrastructure Mohammed Bulbulia, said:
“We were keen to adopt Nutanix NC2 on Azure, and it has already impressed us — especially in how it simplifies disaster recovery. Even though we haven’t fully implemented it yet, the early experience has been extremely promising. We’re aiming to complete the full deployment by the end of the year.
“The platform is surprisingly straightforward to work with. There is a bit of adjustment needed, but it's more about translating your existing knowledge than starting from scratch. Even at this stage, it's clear that NC2 is a real game-changer. It’s already making our digital estate more resilient, and I’m confident that once fully in place, it will transform the way we approach DR. If you have the resources, I’d definitely recommend going all-in with NC2 across Azure and AWS, using one as your DR site. This is absolutely the product to do it with.”
Rehman is looking forward to exploring more of the Nutanix portfolio.
“We’ve been happy with the product and the company, so the next step is to see what else is out there,” he says.
“We are looking at microsegmentation for our network and security. We can’t afford to work with too many people because that has a resource constraint on us.”
His closing advice?
“I’d encourage other universities to not assume there is a silver bullet out there and a VMware or Broadcom will come along and address all your issues. The business model for VMware has changed considerably and the Nutanix model is a flexible model that fits many sizes of university and provides a platform for the future.”
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